The NBA Is (Literally) Rolling Out the Red Carpet for Its Best-Dressed Players

The Rockets are a perfect petri dish for this sort of pageantry. Put a list together of the NBA’s biggest fashion nerds and most closely watched characters and you’ll find three Houston Rockets: Russell Westbrook, Harden, and PJ Tucker. The latter two are both styled by Kesha McLeod, who received the news of the red carpet like a heatwave. “I started sweating,” she tells me. “Because what it does is it puts pressure on me “

Because the red carpet wasn’t just a harbinger of the NBA’s continued fashion evolution but a wider professionalization of the arena walk-in. For the Rockets, it doesn’t stop at the red carpet and DJ but an Instagram carousel of every look sponsored by the watch brand Tissot. This is happening across the NBA: a large brick wall the Cleveland Cavaliers walk in front of is painted with a Tissot ad, the Los Angeles Clippers outfits are presented as “Lexus Looks,” and the Utah Jazz outfits are sponsored by a tailor called Mr Mac Suits. The Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers, Detroit Pistons, Charlotte Hornets, and Washington Wizards all get paid by a variety of companies just for getting their players to walk into work. (Now, teams like the Milwaukee Bucks that haven’t gone this route appear charmingly lo-fi: look at this big thing of bread behind the players!)

McLeod says that LeBron James and the rest of his Cavaliers squad wearing matching Thom Browne suits for home games in the 2017 playoffs changed how everyone viewed the walk-in tunnel. No longer was it just about players one-upping one another but brands meticulously strategizing for these opportunities. “Now I have designers like, ‘Hey Kesha, we want Christmas day, we want the dah-dah-dah-dah,’” McLeod says. “‘Hey, the designer is from Boston, he wants a Boston Celtics game,’ so those are the types of emails that are now going on.” Premiere matchups on Christmas, opening night, or other nationally televised games are in high demand, but brands also consider what exactly it is they are hoping to get out of a player wearing their clothes and plan accordingly. “Someone like [the brand] Coach is like, ‘We only want cold states ‘cause we got coats we need to get off,” McLeod says.

Russell WestbrookBill Baptist / Courtesy of The Houston Rockets

This changes how McLeod works in myriad ways. For instance, outfits are now planned out far in advance—like, way, way in advance. Tucker’s opening night look—a head-to-toe Sacai jumpsuit sprouting with a pitch-black nightmare version of Los Angeles’s palm-tree-stippled skyline—came together in June. McLeod is now in a position to tell brands coming to her that she can try and slot them in for the 2020-2021 season. McLeod knows what her clients are wearing for Christmas and as far into April.

McLeod is also trying to make room for non-clothing brands. Tucker accessorized that Sacai look with a Starbucks cup—a sort of proof-of-concept for brands that might be interested in getting in on a picture alongside big-time fashion labels that might go viral or confound Charles Barkley on national television. Starbucks didn’t pay Tucker to carry its cup but McLeod assures me this sort of placement could be coming to NBA arenas very soon. “Trust me,” she says, “if I'm thinking about it, I've already started things in the works.“

NBA arena walk-ins going the way of “accidental” Game of Thrones product placement and music videos laden with Beats speakers is a logical endpoint. As players have ascended to style icon status, millions of eyeballs have followed and the average person now wants to not just play like their favorite superstar but dress like them. Giving them a red carpet and a DJ to make their arrival feel that much more special was a no-brainer to Houston’s Alvarado. “It wasn't rocket science,” she says.

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